The last week has been mostly spent working on two core mechanics. Although both could still do with some tidying up, they’re both functional.

Reactive Pathfinding

The idea behind reactive pathfinding is that the character will keep checking their path as they progress down it to see if the route can be optimized. The result will therefore be a shorter path and hopefully one which looks more natural.

Field of View

Field of view is a key mechanic so the characters can see enemies and know how to remain hidden. The method was completely changed from the original. Instead of doing a periodic check along an angle like what was originally used, it now uses a line intersection check to see where the ray hits a wall. This will give a smoother line next to walls.

Original FOV

New FOV

What’s next?

Well now the field of view is in place the next step is to add in the mechanics of what to do once something is seen. This will be the beginnings of adding in some sort of simple behaviour to the characters.

It’s been a while since working on Exitus but it started playing on my mind over Christmas as to why it was abandoned. The main reason was due to the time to take fixing bugs and not progressing, these bugs were mainly due to trying to build something too quickly and the structure becoming difficult to maintain.

It was therefore decided to reign back some of the features for now and rework them. It also allowed me to familiarize myself with something I had been interested in for a while, WebGL.

After building up the core groundwork for WebGL I began incorporating previous pieces back into the new version.

So far the city generation is in place but limited to just one block, there’s also no internal structure which was one of the pieces which needed the most fixing. The path finding is also in place but being worked on again to give it some well needed improvements, the main being implementing reactive path finding to make it look more natural.

After spending a fair amount of time on the perimeter buildings and not getting it to work nicely I’ve stashed it for now to work on other pieces.

I’ve added some basic characters, enemy and player. Currently they’re just coloured circles with a code showing their field of vision. If a player goes into an enemy’s FOV then the player will turn white. Just so we know they’ve been seen, in the future they’ll start chasing the player.

Players are black and can be selected, once selected they can have a path created by clicking on the map. Enemies will just move randomly around the map.

I’ve spent a little time working on a project to learn ECMA6 and the process of transpiling it down to ECMA6. The project is essentially rewriting a collection of code I’ve previously written in other languages and merging them together to play nicely. I’m now considering developing it further into a survival game.

So far I’ve put together the bulk of the city generation and the polygon path finding. The polygon mesh currently consists of the roads and a very basic algorithm for building layout. In the image the polygons are only visible for the current city block you’re currently in. This is only temporary so you can see the room layout as there’s no building textures yet.

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I had originally thought that having procedurally generated building layouts would be good but I’m now thinking that having preset layouts would be a better idea.

There’s some lag while moving around the world which I’ve got to address and I’ve still to combine the perimeter buildings as they’re currently split by the city block edges. I’m also eager to get some sort of gameplay added in.

I’ve just released an icon pack for android, it’s still in alpha while I try to increased the quantity of icons. It’s just a simple flat theme icon pack which currently consists of 140 icons.

I’m starting on v0.0.2 as I’ve just created an additional 83 icons in the last couple of weeks. The app itself can scan your installed apps and send me the IDs so I can see the apps people are using and create any missing icons.

The map outline has now been completed so I can finally start concentrating on the actual layout and finer details of the map itself.

I've also finished the import from Pyxel Edit into the game and the video shows a quick device recording so apologies for the jerky movements. You’ll also have to excuse the black right border, it’ll be covered by UI so it didn’t need to go to the edge of the screen

One minor issue which is going to annoy me is there's a small line between each tile. This is a pixel or so from the Java bitmap selection functionality I'm using to get part of the tileset onto a Sprite. Not a huge issue, it's just going to bug me til it's sorted.

Up til now I’ve just been developing on a testbed 20×20 tile grid. This has been fine for testing but I wasn’t sure how well it’d run with the real map size of 254×212.

Method #1 – one big canvas

The original method was using one big canvas and drawing each tile to it which was fine for the small number of tiles used for testing. For the final number of tiles however resulted in instant failure due to bitmap size restrictions. I had considered using multiple smaller bitmaps but went on to trying the next method

Method #2 – individual tiles

The second method was using a separate sprite for each individual tile instead of one giant one. This had marginal success as in it didn’t fall over instantly. Instead it was just horrifically slow and made the game unusable. I spent quite a bit of time diagnosing bottlenecks and trying to speed things up. The main idea was to stop rendering all the tiles which were off screen but there was still the overhead of the tiles existing in the first place. This led me to come up with the final method

Method #3 – reusable tiles

The final method came from the idea: what if I didn’t need all the tiles created at once, all I need is enough tiles to cover the screen then reuse them when they’re out of sight. So now if a tile moves too far to the left and off the screen, it redraws and repositions itself to be the next tile on the right.

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In this example, there’s only ever 80 tiles (8×10) yet I’m able to create a map of all 53,848 tiles with minimal overhead.

Over the last few weeks I’ve made a little more progress on the map but most of the time has been spent on the code base. Map-wise I’ve continued working around the map to get the edges in place and started the rough placing for a mountainous path (the swirly bit).￼

Code wise I’ve been reworking the tasks to allow building up a task queue so you can set your runner to do multiple tasks without interruption. They still need the option to view active tasks as well as remove or edit them.

I’ve also added in basic Quests. They’re randomly assigned at the moment but I’ll add in some structure later on. They’re automatically assigned upon reaching a location and they have a requirement of delivering one or more of a specific item. You can then assign the task to a runner to deliver an item if the runner have it in their inventory.

I'd started working on an idea for a game a while back and it faded into the background but now I'm back to working on it. The main concept is a supply / demand style game where you have to obtain specific items and deliver them.

It's going to take place on an island which I had originally intended to be generated but on reflection it wouldn't add anything so I'm rethinking it to be a static map. For this I started out with looking for an island map I liked the look of for a starting point and I went with Lombok in Indonesia.

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I've been using Pyxel Edit to create a tile map and tile over the original image.

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I've created about thirty tiles to handle the majority of angles of the edges but I'll probably create a few more for variety. Once the outline is done I can start adding some additional features.